Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"… We have a name, we have evidence, we have a four-year- old photograph. It's just a matter of time, Prime Minister."

The Commander saw the tired and wan face of the Prime Minister.

He sipped quietly at his tea.

"It's just that we seem so helpless."

"Oh, we'll get him. Some day, some place."

The anger started to the Prime Minister's face, the blood coursed through his cheek veins, bulged corridors on his forehead. "When will you get him, where?"

The Commander had been back eleven days from Belfast. He had been taken for a helicopter ride. Three thousand feet up, rolling in a Lynx, clear of the range of a 12.7 mm heavy machine- gun, he had been shown the small farms, the close-set villages, and the bleak gale-swept landscape.

"When? When he comes home… Where? Where he's from, Altmore Mountain."

There was no complaint from Ernest Wilkins, just a personal sadness. It was so hard to find the right sort of man to send across. He had thought this man ideal, and the sadness came from the knowledge that he had been wrong. He listened.

"You can understand this, Mr Wilkins. It's not what I'm supposed to say… I cared what happened to him."

Wilkins understood well enough, and if he had appeared distracted it was probably because he was trying to imagine Brennard in this experienced man's place. It was a hell of a job to fill. He paid close attention, but he said nothing.

"Most of the time, in the early days, he was so scared that he used to shake when I met him. He was more scared of us than he was of his own, and more frightened of going back inside than anything. He loved those kids. That's what it came down to. I think he'd have topped himself if he'd gone back inside. The money was just gravy, it was the threat of going back inside that held him to us. And then he'd begun to get quite good. It wasn't high-grade stuff because he was only a bottle washer, a volunteer, but he knew what was going on and he drove a bit for them, moving stuff. That's when it starts to get really bloody, when he has something to tell you. It's my fault, you see, I put the report in to Task Co-ordinating Group. Parker wasn't there. God knows where Parker was. So I gave the report to bloody Hobbes, and Hobbes chucked it onto the T.C.G. table. They were going to do a hit. Eddie knew the guns were being moved, but he didn't know the target. It wasn't discussed properly, it was all too fast. They were moving the rifles the next evening, and a V.C.P. was set up. The police wanted arrests. It must have been something said by one of the detectives who questioned them at Gough R.U.C. Somebody slipped up, because as soon as they saw a solicitor the word was back into the system that it hadn't just been an accident. The tout hunt started. The Q.M. knew they were moving the firepower, and Eddie knew because he'd collected them from the cache, and the two guys in the car. It all pointed to Eddie

… You know what Hobbes said? Sorry, but he's such a prick, that man.

He said Eddie was nothing more than a terrorist, and not worth crying over."

Late Saturday afternoon. The street lights on. Curzon Street deserted.

He watched from the upper window of Leconfield House as Faber came out of the main entrance and walked away to find a bus or an underground train.

He shrugged into his anorak. So difficult, Ernest Wilkins thought, to find men who were not degraded and disgusted by the Belfast work.

He came out of his office, closed the door and locked it, and walked past Brennard's clean, cleared desk. So extraordinarily difficult to find men who could cope with the Belfast work, and not be scarred.

He was out to whist that evening and should hurry himself if he was not to miss the first rubber.

"… What I was told to say was that there's a powerful anger here about it. There's people talking on the radio about being ashamed to be Irish. Army Council, Chief of Staff, nobody likes that."

The woman was making the call because the man who would otherwise have made it believed himself to be under close surveillance. They were uncertain in the Organisation as to the capability of the telephone engineers working for Five to trace calls made from pay phones.

There was a queue waiting to use the box. She had turned her back on them so that she could not see their impatience.

"… And I was told to say that next time round they're expecting you to be double certain that it's the target, not his wife and not his kids. They said to tell you they're going to put an apology into An Phoblacht. They said you should know that they don't like having to do t h a t… "

She didn't know the face or the name of the man, and he had said nothing beyond the codeword.

"… They also said that what you done up to this last one was just brilliant… Oh, and the new money's coming through, and they said like can you spend it a bit slower. It's difficult to come by. That's all that I was to tell you."

She put the telephone down and the handle of the receiver glistened.

She felt the sweat in her palm. She was nothing in the Organisation but her brother was in his twelfth year of a life sentence and she was happy to be used. She was sweating because she had had to allow the telephone to ring out at the far end for a full two minutes before it was picked up, before the codeword was given her, and then she had to repeat the message that they had given her. As far as she was concerned, any man who had worked on the mainland was a hero. She thought it quite wrong that he should be slagged for what he had done.

She walked away up the Andersonstown Road of West Belfast.

His enemy were the retired and the elderly who walked on the esplanade with their lap dogs that were wrapped against the sea weather with little monogrammed coats, and the teenagers who smashed what they could not steal, and the fishermen off the trawlers who were waiting for the doors of the bars to open, and the driver who took the empty bus from Torquay to Brixham, and the man who stood beside the heaps of his Sunday newspapers that were covered against the spray by plastic sheeting. They were all his enemy. He had chosen this out-of-season resort town, and it was the only place he felt safe.

Never truly safe, God knows, and among his enemies he would never be content. And on Sunday always more alone, more keenly missing his Kevin and his Attracta. In far too long he had had no word from his Attracta, not heard her voice.

He felt such an ache of homesickness, of longing to be with his boy and his Attracta, it was a physical pain.

The newspaper seller was smiling at him, friendly. He pointed to the papers that he wanted and he searched out the exact change from his pocket. He spoke as rarely as was possible, and never engaged in conversation with anyone he didn't know. He could change his face and his hair and his clothes, his accent he could not alter. The newspaper seller, his enemy, wished him a good morning and thanked him, and made a remark about the weather brightening from the west. He read the headline of the paper on top, and saw the photograph of the destroyed Volvo. Under it was a quote from a retired Secretary of State, one of the worst of the bastards: "These terrorists are addicted to the adventure and thrill of killing."

His fingers were clasped tight. They knew nothing of him, the pensioners and the yob kids and the bus driver and the newspaper seller, and they would lap up the shit that he was "addicted to the adventure and thrill of killing". They knew nothing… And they didn't know much in Dublin and Belfast, the bastards who had a bit of a girl speak to him on the phone like he was a wee brat who had messed his pants on the first day at school and a complaint had been made by the nuns to his Ma, and he a man on their business hunted by every policeman in their enemy's country, by all the detectives of the Anti-Terrorist Branch and the Special Branch, and by the faceless bastards of M.I. 5. That was close to pleasure, the knowledge that they all hunted him, and failed. He would never be complacent, no. But if he were not complacent and never careless then he believed himself impregnable.